Lauren Van Gieson returns from a fencing tournament in Philadelphia. Exhausted from the travel and competition schedule, she would appreciate a Monday morning of sleeping in, or at least dozing through a large lecture class.

Instead, she wakes at 9 a.m. for an appointment with cadavers.

A day with Van Gieson, a Communication junior, is not all that different than it would be with other athletes. Whether in class or playing their sport, their passion to perform is evident. It’s also time consuming.

Daily Sports spent an hour with Van Gieson, who is captain of the fencing team, in her independent study laboratory to learn more about her life as a scholar-athlete at Northwestern. The sabreist discussed the challenges of balancing fencing and medical school ambitions, opened the door to her dissection project, and, most importantly, gave Daily Sports a hearty dose of Febreze upon leaving.

9:50 a.m.

It’s time for Van Gieson to begin work in the laboratory. She walks down the hall and enters a small room with a sink, bright lights and two covered cots in the left corner. She covers her black sweater and jeans with a long coat and slips two yellow gloves over her hands.

Then she delicately removes the sheet over one of the cots to reveal the upper torso of a human cadaver. She does not cringe.

“The only thing that bothers me is the smell sometimes,” says Van Gieson, using her hands to remove a thick layer of skin from the shoulder, revealing tissue, veins and fat. “I’m probably known as the smelly girl in class.”

10:00 a.m.

As she digs deeper under the skin, exposing the bone, she also reveals more about her life.

Van Gieson will be the first person in her family to apply to medical school. Although she says she works hard, Van Gieson confesses she often worries her grades won’t be good enough to be admitted to medical school.

“You have friends who get rejected from med schools with 4.0s, and you’re like ‘What will happen to me?'” Van Gieson says, frowning. “I know that if I didn’t have fencing, my GPA would be higher. That can be frustrating.”

Van Gieson, who is majoring in communication sciences and disorders, says she decided to enroll at NU instead of schools with more elite fencing programs because she believed she would receive a better education. Fencing coach Laurie Schiller recruited her in high school to be a scholarship athlete at NU.

The university athletic staff helps athletes in minor but useful ways, Van Gieson says. Unlike some other universities, NU pays for transportation to national events. The staff also washes players’ practice clothing and assigns them to academic counselors.

“They make sure you do well in your classes and put them first,” Van Gieson says, stepping back from the cadaver to sketch a diagram of the lymph nodes.

Sometimes athletics and academics overlap in unexpected ways. The link between fencing and med-school ambitions may not be as obvious as, for instance, the link between Model United Nations and political science, but Van Gieson says her sport adds a new dimension to her studies.

“I really want to work on knees next,” says Van Gieson, whose interest in the body part arose when she tore her anterior cruciate ligament during a fencing practice her freshman year.

While at a tournament in 2002, she tore the ligament completely. The injury and the consequent surgical procedures sparked Van Gieson’s interest in the anatomy of knees. Schiller, her coach, says the injury made her a stronger person, both on and off the mat.

“She showed a lot of courage and fortitude to come back from a devastating injury,” he says.

Athletes in individual sports such as fencing tend to be bright and independent, Schiller says.

“You have to respond to situations quickly,” he says. “That takes a fair amount of intelligence.”

10:10 A.m.

Van Gieson folds the flap of skin back over the left shoulder and switches to the right one. She cuts away the skin and the layers of fat surrounding the tissue and bone.

“The fat is the grossest part,” she says, using a napkin to wipe the gooey substance off her dissection utensil.

Because fencing doesn’t draw many spectators, few realize it is a demanding sport. Van Gieson keeps her body lean through daily, two-hour fencing practices and twice-a-week weightlifting sessions. Her team has tournaments almost every weekend, complete with 5 a.m. wake-up calls and little time to do homework. It’s difficult to avoid stress, she says.

“I feel a lot of pressure,” she says. “I really, really want to go to the NCAAs.”

Van Gieson began fencing in eighth grade, following in the footsteps of her older sister. She also participated in cheerleading and track during high school but decided to continue with only fencing in college. Her parents sometimes wonder if she should continue the challenge of balancing sports and school, but Van Gieson’s mom, Alice, says her daughter is too enthusiastic about fencing to stop.

“Ask her if she’d stop and she’ll screech, ‘Are you kidding? I can’t give it up!'” her mom says.

10:20 a.m.

A Daily photographer enters the room and steps back, moving away from the cadaver for a second. Once he gets used to the extra body in the room, the photographer asks Van Gieson if she names the cadavers. She smiles.

Earlier, she mentioned that there are two questions she always gets from people when she mentions dissecting.

“A lot of people are like, ‘Do you name them?’ or ask if I’m scared to be alone with them,” she says. “You get a lot of those questions.”

Although she admits she was nervous the first time she interacted with a cadaver, she no longer fears being around the dead.

“In med school, I won’t be as freaked out as everyone else,” she says.

10:30 a.m.

The hour in Van Gieson’s her lab is coming to a close, but her day is just beginning.

After finishing her examination of the right shoulder, she will lift weights for an hour and study for classes such as Neuromotor Disorders in Children. Van Gieson then will go to fencing practice, where the team is preparing for the Midwest Fencing Championships on Saturday and Sunday — a competition in which Van Gieson could qualify for a spot at the NCAA Championships.

Schiller says Van Gieson, like most fencers he’s coached during 26 years at NU, is consistently dedicated to both academic and athletic excellence.

“She’s very serious about what she does,” he says. “She doesn’t screw around.”